FBI Says White Supremacists As Dangerous As ISIS, So The Alt-Right Is Tweeting About 'Antifa Terrorists'

Are right-wing extremists as dangerous as ISIS? Well, those of us who have paid enough attention to know that, post-9/11, more people have been killed by them than by jihadist terrorists certainly think so. And now, as of last week, the FBI does as well.

On Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray announced that the bureau now considers racially motivated violent extremists a threat on apar with ISIS, elevating their threat level to "national threat priority" for the year 2020. In a statement before the House Judiciary Committee, Wray said that the FBI would be dedicated to combating both domestic terrorism and hate crimes, noting that the majority of these attacks are "fueled by some type of white supremacy."

Wray also noted that the kind of racist rhetoric that has become so very popular lo these last few years is part of what has fueled race-motivated violence to become the most lethal form of terrorism in the United States.

In many cases, perpetrators can move quickly from rhetoric to violence, Wray said.

"They choose easily accessible weapons — a car, a knife, a gun, maybe an IED they can build crudely off the internet — and they choose soft targets," Wray said. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now."Racially-motivated violent extremists were the primary source of ideologically-motivated violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001, Wray said in a statement Wednesday.

This weekend, about 150 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front — an organization that split off from the explicitly fascist and white nationalist group Vanguard America after VA member James Alex Fields, Jr. ran Heather Heyer over with his car in Charlottesville — marched on Washington, in matching outfits and masks, with accompanying police escorts, chanting "Reclaim America!"

Now, just to be clear — Patriot Front did not split off from Vanguard America over a disagreement about ideology or whether or not murdering people is a good or idea, but over a disagreement on optics. Patriot Front's leader, 22-year-old Thomas Rousseau, felt that walking around with swastikas and explicitly chanting about Jews was a bad look, and likely to attract negative media attention. You think?

An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.

Their "manifesto" also calls for a white ethnostate, made up of only of those who are Mayflower material.

The state has long since ceased to advocate for the interests of the descendants of its creators, and thus a State which will be, above all else, a reflection of the national interest must be implemented fully and absolutely.

It's easy to go "Oh please, they can want their special white ethnostate from now until forever, they're not getting it," but this is the kind of rhetoric that results in hate crimes (and running people over with cars). These people become obsessed with these ideas and soon enough, they're willing to kill to get it, even if that means dying themselves. It's not exactly hard to get people to die for what they consider patriotism or what they consider their freedom or their country.

At a demonstration at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, Rousseau said:

"America our nation stands before an existential threat. The lives of your children, and your children's children, and your prosperity beyond that, dangle above a den of vipers. A corrupt, rootless, global, and tyrannical elite has usurped your democracy and turned it into a weapon, first to enslave and then to replace you."

That rhetoric is meant to incite violence. As bad as things are right now, the United States is not gonna go "Oh, you poor dears! You want an ethnostate? Guess we'll just ask millions and millions of people to move immediately," which means that the only way for them to further these goals and prevent themselves from being enslaved and replaced is though trying to incite a violent revolution. America becoming a white ethnostate is not a thing that is going to happen through the regular Democratic process.

Naturally, what with the FBI declaring white supremacists a threat as bad as ISIS, and literal Nazis marching in the streets of the capital, some of the idiots of the alt-right have started to get a little nervous. So over the weekend, led by notorious antifa-obsessed troll Andy Ngo, they got #antifaterrorists to trend on Twitter.

The goal, whenever right-wing extremists get bad publicity, is to both-sides it to death.

Like this lady trying to get police to arrest a black guy for the crime of calling her a "honky."

She's not just some random lady who was minding her own business, she's actually a fairly notorious racist and Holocaust denier known to harass black people and leftist activists all throughout Portland. She knows exactly what she's doing.

By focusing on the comparatively few instances of people associated with the anti-fascist movement getting violent, these jackasses hope to drown out criticism of ideologies that have proven themselves lethal. It's straight propaganda. It's also extremely effective propaganda, because they know that people who like to think of themselves as fair and reasonable will be quick to denounce antifa tactics and do the whole "I don't like Nazis but no one deserves to get punched!" or "OK but still it's not nice to call an older lady a honky" rigamarole without understanding that it's meant to be a trap. And it is almost always going to be a trap.

Robyn Pennacchia is a brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning angel of a human being, who shrugged off what she is pretty sure would have been a Tony Award-winning career in musical theater in order to write about stuff on the internet. In addition to her work at Wonkette, she also has a biweekly column at Dame. Follow her on Twitter at @RobynElyse